CHAPTER IV

IN THE COTSWOLD HILLS

R. GISSING, in his very temperamental little book on Broadway, in

M

sists that to appreciate this unique

town it is essential that you should approach it over the hill, and in a northwest wind. We arrived in southeast rain, and by way of the valley. Yet I doubt if Mr. Gissing were so completely overcome by the combined delights of Broadway as I was. It was almost too much to digest. It seems unreal to walk all through a town and never see a brick villa, or a house later than centuries of age. It is a sort of Tudor Pompeii. It is as typical a place of Elizabethan England as Rothenburg or Hildesheim or Assisi are of their times and climes.

Mary Anderson's home is as perfect a stage setting as any star could wish; and it would hardly be possible to over-rate the charms of the hotel, the Lygon Arms, which has been an inn ever since the fifteenth century, and was a manor house before that! One of the sitting

rooms is the apartment occupied by Cromwell, while another has a stone floor and stone Gothic doorways, and, when we were first there, was used as the smoking lounge.

Broadway has been evolved from the old Saxon name, Bradenwege. An ancient historian speaks of it as "the brode and highe waye from the shepherd's cotes on the mounted woldes, to the fruitful vale of Evesham." We were much amused at a waiter who, in immaculate evening dress and torturingly high collar, informed us that Broadway was named " for a part of New York in America." The town was a prosperous community before America was even discovered.

In this hotel they have a curiosity in the shape of an old man-trap, a hideous iron conceit, now exhibited in a harmless attitude on the wall, but once doubtless the terror of some select rural spot. After seeing Broadway I felt as if I should never consider anything picturesque again.

We were dilating on the joys of the town to a native, who, as it were, gave us the "other side of Broadway." She observed, cynically, "Well, I only know it's terrible in winter!" And, when one comes to think of it, I suppose it would be monotonous to have as one's only

outlook that one long street. But what a street! with its rows of delicious houses, that look as if a giant had spilled them on the hill side, where they cling frantically, some to the earth, and some to each other! No two angles of roofs or façades are alike.

The woman smiled, and added: "But sometimes artists come, and they draw us people and the street! Mr. Phil May used to come often, and he made many pictures of us; and, my word, they were like! Why, one day he took an old man over to the 'otel, and he gave him so much champagne that he could hardly walk, and then he made him go down the street in front of him, and made drawings of his back!"

This ingenuous description of an artist's wiles was given with pride that her fellow townsman had been accounted worthy to be Phil May's model!

Mr. F. D. Millet, the American artist, has his studio in the most exquisite old priory, with a garden made famous in many well-known pictures. Sargent's picture, "Carnation Lily, Lily, Rose," now in the Tate Gallery, was painted here. The foundations of the old Priory date from the Prior of Worcester in the days of King John.

I felt as if I had exhausted all possible pleas